David Bateman had his most recent book, Shtum: The Stutter Poems published by Iron Press, 2016. It's available from Iron Press, Amazon and elsewhere. ‘punchy poems... told with wit and invention’ – The Crack Magazine.

Born in 1936, our Rex
an old fashioned movie house.
was not a multiplex .
For a few years it was alive
but eventually expired
in nineteen-eighty-five.
We treasured our ‘king ’
and its closure to all of us
was a painful sting.
We waited with patience
for many years, in silence.
Now the gods have spoken:
the Rex once again is open.

James Schwartz is a poet, slam performer, writer and author of four poetry collections including "The Literary Party: Growing Up Gay and Amish in America" and most recently "Punatic" (Writing Knights Press). http://literaryparty.blogspot.com Twitter: @queeraspoetry

Sunday, 23 December 2018

"But so what if your baubles don’t match and you haven’t moved that blasted Elf off the Shelf for three days."

It's a fun run upTo Xmas day.Economic measures are well intentioned-Just buy a few pressies,Don't need to eat out or buy much in-Just look at other peopleOn Universal Credit, waitingFor a payment which won't come before Christmas.

As November progresses one realises;The suggestion of Secret Santa for the family hasn't workedSo individual presents are in order,Relatives on both sides have extended.A visit to Birmingham Christmas market costsA hundred quid but, first class was a good offer.

Good friends; Don't need to go too mad,Though it all tots up.Pressures to go for meals-Oh we should even thoughIt'll take weeks of organising (And deposits)God forbid anyoneWho doesn't turn up.

Okay we won't go to Waitrose-But have you seen how much a single shopAt B&M and TescoCan add up.There are stringent successes;

No way am I buying Baileys,Some Irish Cream at half the price will doThe Christmas market in Chester is avoided,Covered in lights and money traps.

If you don't have the perfect Christmas tree;And titbits, techy pressies and whopping turkey(Bought on credit, quite likely)Take a leaf from Port Talbot's sorry tree-It's the love behind it that countsNot how verdant or glowy it is.But make sure you saveFor next year's foray.

Amanda Derry joined a Creative Writing class, following a breakdown, which played a significant role in her recovery. She now embeds literacy skills into classes that she teaches. Amanda also runs the Facebook Group, I Love Writing.

Saturday, 22 December 2018

Sun rising late,
over the hill road
at daybreak,
time bends itself like this
among my own mountains
under the sagging year.

Moon-rise
waxes gibbous
with its skeptic’s face
half-hidden by heathland;
too many dark hours persist
between dusk and daybreak
for the soul to thaw out
or the eyes to see
anything but time
and bitter cold.

This year

snow did not fall.

In the shortening days,
it may never fall again
if winter steals summer’s ransom;
no matter how dark the darkness
frost can no longer cut
the spirit’s weakness
nor harden it
to an edge.

There is a turning

in the late hours after sunset,this evening, as the planet, at last,heaves herself back toward tomorrow,begins the days’ slow lengtheninginto spring and summer,here, in the north.

Much later,

in the forest,
trees must find a way
to lift green to the sky again
and one day unfold its season
in the open heart of the year.

Friday, 21 December 2018

this poem will self-destruct
a cryptic instruction a scrawl of invisible ink
a powder-puff of toner intangible and gone
message ends

if you pay for the privilege
by coin-crossed palm some subscription
or a crowd-funded work of art or activism
stare at the words until your eyes bleed
hollow out the meaning as if this cup
of text was a fruit full of flesh
ready for consuming

money has gone out of fashion now
along with civilised behaviour
it is the end of history
gold and silver melted for scrap
paper money shredded by an artist’s trick

more fool you who thought the green-eyed
monster was only envy but then found
payment and its transacting touches
a hand-to-hand financial contagion
that fed your souls

too bad
as the hammer fell the blades were spinning
and acquisition and ownership rendered obsolete
torn remnants of an idea of yourself you once had
an idea once bolstered by your purchasing power
fiscal leverage of the self-important suit
that money buys to make itself
seem artful and alive

some suspected the waste paper
piled beneath the frame was more valuable
than the image now destroyed just as this poem
if you look long enough will rearrange its words
or dissolve like cheap copy-paper in rain
becoming something else

Brian Hill. 50 years a poet. One-time designer and film-maker; long ago, the rhyme-slinger, cartoon cowboy, and planetarium poet; now feverishly stringing words together in the hope of making sense.
Brian blogs as Scumdadio (don’t ask).

It is not a dreadnoughtbut a dreadful dronethat's driving us mad.No one knows whois controlling the craft.If it is a callous cador a simpleton, daft,who doesn't realisethat this risky objectendangers the skiesand puts in jeopardyanyone who flies.

that he was the besthe failed to passthe ultimate test.It seems that he wasfar too short-sightedfor that famous teamManchester United.His attitude was feltby every Mancunianto be out of touchand antediluvian.

David Subacchi lives in Wales (UK) where he was born of Italian roots. He studied at the University of Liverpool and has five published collections of his poetry in English and one in Welsh. You can find out more about David here.

Luigi Pagano has published three collections of poems: ‘Idle Thoughts’, ’Reflections’ and ‘Poetry On Tap’. His work has been featured in ABCTales’ magazines, UKAuthors’ anthologies, Poetry24 and several other publications.

Wear earplugs- If you're at an open air gin festival With decibels drifting overNearby residences,It's the locals themselvesWho'll probably pop in the sponges.DJ's playing in enclosed bar spaces-After a few rum cocktails you won't noticeThey've pumped the volume up,And those aren't church bellsRinging outside.

Amanda Derry joined a Creative Writing class, following a breakdown, which played a significant role in her recovery. She now embeds literacy skills into classes that she teaches. Amanda also runs the Facebook Group, I Love Writing.

Thursday, 13 December 2018

Disease X represents the knowledge that a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease, and so the R&D Blueprint explicitly seeks to enable cross-cutting R&D preparedness that is also relevant for an unknown “Disease X” as far as possible.

Tuesday, 11 December 2018

Theresa got the deal done and assured us 'Its the best'
The 'Backstop's not a problem' if it meets her red line test
She sent out all the cabinet to quell MPs unrest
Persuade them not to vote against became the Ministers' quest
Their weekend ruined as she sent them North, South, East and West
Liz Truss made some black pudding, but not with too much zest
And as they travelled round some even wore a yellow vest
They left their homes and families, and could not invite guests
And muttered underneath their breath 'Theresa's such a pest'
And all to keep dissenters down, those vipers in her nest
But now she's had to stop the vote, its serious not a jest
Brexit means Brexit, NOT, it seems. I really must protest!

There is a conventwhich nuns inhabitwhere two of themacquired a bad habit.As the treasury hada considerable sumthe sisters decidedthey would get some.They leapt aboutin a playful gamboltook five-hundred Kto travel and gamble.For this piteous pairthe future looked bleakbut by avoiding jailthey had a lucky streak.

Marleen S. Barr is known for her pioneering work in feminist science fiction and teaches English at the City University of New York. She has won the Science Fiction

Research Association Pilgrim Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction criticism. Barr is the author of Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fictionand Feminist Theory, Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond, Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction, and GenreFission: A New Discourse Practice for Cultural Studies. Barr has edited many anthologies and co-edited the science fiction issue of PMLA.
She has published the novels Oy Pioneer! and Oy Feminist Planets: A Fake Memoir. Her When Trump Changed: The Feminist Science Fiction Justice League Quashes the OrangeOutrage Pussy Grabber is the first single-authored Trump short story collection.

Lower the voting age to sixThe academic said;It will recorrect imbalances at the other endWhere you can vote at sixty, seventy, eighty-There is no cut off point.Children have sensibilities-They wouldn't have voted for Brexit or TrumpGive six year olds the vote,Why not.

Saturday, 8 December 2018

Leave a memorial,The hotel was toldSo it did a conscientious job,Outlining every detail-Including a lager can.If the commission Had been in BritainThe likelihood is that cultural sensibilitiesWould have been more sympathetic;What may be a fitting tribute in JamaicaLed to shock and condemnationPlus, a full refund from the travel agents.

Friday, 7 December 2018

I hear of a child being torn
from their mother’s embrace
Instantly I remember
the feeling resting there:
between lanky limbs;
voice through ribcage,
fingers playing with
stresses of my fine hair
being held as if
was I constructed of glass
or some precious, dried out clay

Easily breakable is the child

This child was stolen
from those branches of
careful, soulful loving
dragged away from life’s
warm source
howling throats
join in chorale disharmony
soon to be cut,
soon to be silenced

No vase or glass
crushed against their floors
but the skulls carrying
stresses of fine, soft hair
not granted time to grow
long,
gray,
wise

Easily breakable is the child

We leave a future to rot
in rooms where eyes go blind
yet the howling voices of
robbed mothers
echoe through the memory
carried forward
in the fragility of their embrace

My phone is possessed;
I'm receiving multiple messages
With difficulty sending,
It's disconcerting.
Imagine a world where all networks
Went down.
Considering mobiles are a main culprit
Of relationship break-ups
They keep us connected
We are globally popular.

Amanda Derry joined a Creative Writing class, following a breakdown, which played a significant role in her recovery. She now embeds literacy skills into classes that she teaches. Amanda also runs the Facebook Group, I Love Writing.

Note: John Keats went on a Scottish Tour in June 1818, leaving his brother Tom, who was very sick behind in London. Prof. Richard Cronin touched upon John Keats’s guilt at leaving Tom behind at the Keats Foundation Conference in May 2018 in London. Though Keats nursed him well, Tom Keats died of TB on the 1st of December 1818.

Sultana Raza’s poems and short stories have appeared in 30+ journals, including Columbia Journal, and Caduceus. Her fiction received an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train. She’s presented many papers on Keats.

Harvard doesn't like single sex clubs
Grounds for plotting against the opposite gender,
Men will form elite sexist sororities,
Women will confer against the male of the species
Students should not choose the company they keep,
We are in the education age of inclusion and equality
...after all.

Tuesday, 4 December 2018

Faster and faster; intelligence arrives at the speed of light;
artificial, atrophying intellect animates the buzz-click
streaming data where the network torrents shimmer.

Whose net is this, its mesh upon us, like a Faraday cage,
wound in us, through us, its entanglement, our support,
prison bars where electron flow, capacitance, nano-circuitry,
whittles smallness to an atom’s-hair of nothing?

In air-conditioned basements, dungeons, hubs, under-sea
server farms, we are the only livestock. Who is serving who?
Whose intelligent design carved out these parameters
and built the algorithms of our stupidity?

In the digitised year of our Lord two thousand and then some,
we, at the thin end of history, see miracles on the streets:
but electric eyes scan our faces in the crowd, recognise us,
see before we do, our sin and misdemeanour, our eternal shame

So, digitized, we find our own images posted in accusation;
according to laws of machine-learned logic: our faces and our guilt
for all to see, before any human eye can blink; truth as photography,
eidetic or framed; real or re-imagined with us, its fugitives, absconding.

In the last one hundred years of our Lord, gone and counting,
one thousand nine hundred literal years, coarse speech, uncorrected,
drawled rank verbiage, spat cantankerous knee-jerk baloney,
faces, scowling, squinting, in the crowd, anonymous.

Now, reality is a jailhouse, the byte-stream treats every face
as suspect skin and bone, parades our transgressions, tried, tested,
convicted by mounting evidence in a court of data, by click-bait theorems,
calculated away, incarcerated in the teraflop currents of a binary river.

This internet of things: wheels talk to wheels, pumps to wires, engines,
to each other; we stare in dumb silence at lights flickering in our hands;
no swipe, no touch, no passcode, no retina-print unlocks our confusion:
we are not the ones who will ever again speak a solitary word.

Somewhere else, minds half-human, wilful, bred from flesh but changed,
codified proximate wisdom, made thought-like by the powerful, who, by now,
have given up too much to ever see their graven errors… meanwhile…
elsewhere… demi-god minds rewrite the flawed instructions of eternity.

Fast; faster still; the switches closing on us now control themselves.

Brian Hill. 50 years a poet. One-time designer and film-maker; long ago, the rhyme-slinger, cartoon cowboy, and planetarium poet; now feverishly stringing words together in the hope of making sense.
Brian blogs as Scumdadio (don’t ask).

Sunday, 2 December 2018

Tabloid desperation
For gossip and beration;
Something has to go wrong
With the fairytale dream.
Meghan will take her 20k collection
Of designer heels
Toss that mane
And say,
People close to me ground me,
The rest is just noise.